Tag Archives: Window Performance

Remember last week, when we were talking about glass houses? Well, here’s another Title 24 case study on a 4,500 SF house, also from Swatt|Miers Architects. This house had almost 60% glazing to floor area, much of it custom built on site: 564 square feet of single paned butt glazed corner windows, 540 square feet of frameless glazing, a steel framed window, a 30 foot tall translucent window in a stair tower, 300 square feet of skylights, and a custom built wood screen interspersed with glass panels. That’s almost 2,700 square feet of glass.

And, to make the challenge that much more… piquant… it was in California climate zone 2 (Sonoma – HOT)… AND, they needed to beat California’s Title 24 energy standard by 15% because of local ordinances. It was the combination of all that single glazed area with the climate zone that concerned us the most. But, we had a reputation to maintain, and our motto to designers was, “We’ll never tell you that you have to shrink your windows.”

Actually the real question is whether an all-glass pavilion can still comply with the new version of California’s Title 24 energy code. Although Title 24 has been around since the 1970s, it is only now that designers are feeling the pinch. Given the increasing strictness of the energy code, what can an architect do if he (or she) wants to create designs with dramatic glass curtain walls?

The “glass house” shown on the cover image is, of course, Philip Johnson’s famous Modernist masterpiece, also called the Glass House. Even that house could, with the right high-performing window system, comply with Title 24 requirements – I tested it out. But, let’s talk about some more current designs for our case study.